The Geisha-and-Houseboy-Liberation Theater

NEW YORK is a graveyard of
bankrupt theater companies
and broken dreams. But Tisa
Chang’s Pan Asian Repertory
Theater, with an annual budget
of less than $1 million, is
improbably celebrating its 30th
anniversary.

The company’s latest
production, “Tea,” by Velina
Hasu Houston, is to start
previews Sunday at the West
End Theater, and the first
National Asian American
Theater Festival, which Ms.
Chang has been instrumental in
creating, is coming soon. Old
enough to consider retirement,
she is instead busy remounting
some of the company’s seminal
works, creating international
partnerships, educating
younger generations and
seeking something that proves
unattainable to many of the
city’s companies: a permanent
home.

Part of Pan Asian’s mission is to
widen the scope of
opportunities available to
Asian-American theater artists.
Before the transformative
1970s, Ms. Chang said, options
for Asian-American actors were
generally limited to roles like
geisha girls and exotic
houseboys. Groups like Pan
Asian and East West Players in
Los Angeles, which started in
1965, have worked to level the
playing field, but the struggle
continues, and not only in the
live theater.

“Whereas it’s gotten better for
ethnic minorities in terms of
general representation, what
hasn’t really improved is the
complexity of the roles that
we’ve been given to play,”
Daniel Dae Kim wrote in an email
message. Mr. Dae Kim,
who appears on the ABC series
“Lost,” acted professionally for
the first time with Pan Asian
Rep in 1990. “Many of the parts
I see Asians playing onstage, as
well as on screen, are smaller
supporting roles whose
function is to provide
exposition or support to the
leads,” he wrote.

Thirty years ago starting a
company seemed the best way
to create opportunities for
Asian-American performers,
Ms. Chang said. But it was not
easy. “I’ve always felt that we
absolutely must put the best
foot forward,” she said,
“because I do think we have to
prove a little bit more.”

Her stamina won admirers,
though. “I remember when she
first started, people were saying
it’s hard enough to start a white
theater, let alone an Asian-
American one,” said Tina Chen,
who is directing “Tea.” “Who’s
going to come see you?” But
people came. In the mid-1970s
Ms. Chang was getting
mainstream work as an actor
and dancer, but her passion was
in heading up the Chinese
Theater Group at Ellen
Stewart’s La MaMa in the East
Village. Even shows as
nontraditional as a bilingual
Chinese/English adaptation of
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
set in China in 1000 B.C. sold
tickets.

“Because we were considered a
curiosity or something very new
and unique, people did come,”
Ms. Chang said. “La MaMa
would always attract the kind of
offbeat attendee.”

In 1977 she set out on her own,
and Pan Asian Repertory
Theater, with Ms. Chang as the
producing artistic director, was
incorporated. Early successes
Tisa Chang started the Pan Asian
Repertory Theater in part to expand
opportunities for Asian-American
actors
included a 1983 production of
R. A. Shiomi’s “Yellow Fever,”
directed by Raul Aranas, who
went on to work extensively on
Broadway, and a 1986
production of “Shogun
Macbeth,” adapted and directed
by John R. Briggs. New works
by David Henry Hwang, Philip
Kan Gotanda and others
followed, along with works
from what Ms. Chang calls “the
canon of Asian-American
classics.”

The company’s core principles
have never changed, she said,
adding: “Our mission has
always been to provide
meaningful professional
opportunities and to introduce
the Pan Asian world’s literary
works to Americans in America
and also to create intercultural
projects that draw upon our
own history,” Ms. Chang said.
“We have done Cambodian
genocide, Japanese internment,
dislocation — basically the
acmes and nadirs of Asian-
Americans in America.”

Next up in this vein: war brides.
“Tea,” set in postwar Kansas, is
about a group of Japanese
women, all married to
American military men,
meeting to memorialize one of
their own who killed her
abusive husband and then
herself.

“Tea” was written in 1987 and
produced that year at the
Manhattan Theater Club, but
Ms. Houston said the themes
are still important. The play has
been produced more than 50
times all over the world. “We’re
not beyond race in this
country,” she said. “We have a
lot to learn about existing in a
very colorful society.”

After “Tea” Ms. Chang expects
to remount some of the
company’s most important
productions, including “The Joy
Luck Club” this fall and
“Shogun Macbeth” next year,
which will play both in New
York and at the Off Square
Theater Company in Jackson,
Wyo., where Mr. Briggs is the
artistic director.

The reprises are celebratory,
but there are deeper goals for
the future, like forming
stronger alliances with other
theaters, Ms. Chang said, and
the National Asian American
Theater Festival is a move in
that direction. A group effort by
Pan Asian and two other New
York troupes, Ma-Yi Theater
and the National Asian
American Theater Company,
the festival grew out of
discussions with similar
companies around the country,
including East West Players.
More than two dozen
companies and individuals will
present work at the festival,
which runs June 11 to 24.

Ms. Chang has other plans too,
but producing is expensive. To
survive in New York for three
decades is a feat, but Pan Asian
has not achieved a high level of
mainstream success, and Ms.
Chang partly blames herself. “I
know a lot of people but just
don’t know how to be very
opportunistic,” she said.

Securing more financial
backing is one way to guarantee
a future, but it is also vital that
young Asian-American artists
believe in the importance of the
company. “I get very angry
when the younger generation of
Asian-American students and
artists do not pay enough
attention,” Ms. Chang said.

One way to help establish that
sense of importance would be
to create a permanent home,
but that goal has proved
elusive. “That’s another reason
why we’re not further ahead,”
Ms. Chang said. The company
has presented the past several
seasons at the West End, and
before that rented space at St.
Clement’s Church, Playhouse 91
and other locations.
“Something very regular or
concrete,” though, would allow
for more flexibility and offer
opportunities to create
partnerships with other Asian-
American artists and
companies, Ms. Chang said.
“We have looked at space in
Queens, but I really want to be
in Manhattan, and I also really
want to have an oriental
garden.”

If the garden never comes,
though, Ms. Chang’s track
record suggests she will
continue producing. “Tisa
Chang is a pioneer and a
warrior,” Mr. Dae Kim wrote.
“In a time when many theater
companies are struggling to
survive for even a full season,
it’s hard not to stand in
admiration of Pan Asian’s
achievements.”